Mid-level leaders have something to learn from Odysseus when it comes to coping with ambiguity. Seems like a stretch? Try listening to this week’s conversation between the Mode/Switch team and Dr. Jamie K.A. Smith about being a manager accustomed to ambiguity.

His book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark might not strike you as a business-forward must-read. But our intergenerational conversation—David Wilstermann, Xer; Emily Bosscher, Xennial, and Jake Aupperlee, Gen Z—explored the managerial usefulness of ancient mystic thought.

The best things about talking with Jamie is his capacity for questions. We brought him on the show as an expert, but he quickly mode-switched from expert to novice. By answering our questions with questions of his own, he did more than urge the importance of humble curiosity. He embodied it.

Two questions emerged that matter for mid-level leaders:

1. Emily asked when uncertainty, ambiguity, and mystery become smokescreens. How do people in the middle of organizations discern the difference between ambiguity exploited and ambiguity earned? (Jamie’s response helps leaders discern when mystery becomes mystery-mongering.)

2. David asked when a leader’s embrace of uncertainty covers for incompetence. In other words, appealing to the “ambiguity” of a situation can disguise a leader’s ignorance and sloppiness. (Smith responds with the concept of "learned ignorance,” and it’s worth the podcast.)

I think you'll experience this podcast as surprisingly epic. The energy and humor and spirit probably came from the fact that Jamie was in-studio with us. Together, we found ways through the fog of working community.

You’re on your own odyssey. You’re trying to get home, seeking a place of where work feels safe and meaningful, yearning for flourishing for yourself and for your team.

Think of this podcast as a thirty-minute map. It offers the guidance of focused, substantive, multidirectional conversation about leaders in the luminous dark of their organizational life and work.

Table of Contents

00:00 — Cold Open
Why does information overload always seem to hit hardest when you’re already feeling insecure with your team? That tangle is the whole episode.

02:31 — Welcome, Jamie Smith
A stat that should needle you (87% of workers see manager capability as a company risk) — and Jamie’s origin story on the back of a pickup truck. What actually changes when a leader stops trying to win and starts trying to invite? Jamie walks through his own experience of an existential mode/switch.

05:58 — Learning to Live with Mystery
Can you build real tolerance for uncertainty without turning into the leader who’s just checked out? Here’s the line Jamie draws.

08:19 — Reassurance vs. Reorientation
“We got this” or “here’s where we actually are” — which one does your team actually need to hear from you?

09:08 — Earned Ignorance
Is “I don’t know” a strength or a dodge? David’s question splits the episode open, and Jamie’s answer — by way of Augustine — hands you a phrase you’ll want to keep.

10:39 — Can’t Think Our Way Out of the Culture Wars
More information keeps failing to make anyone less polarized. Jamie’s fix starts in an unlikely place: the mystics.

13:00 — Should Leaders Weigh In?
You probably don’t want your CEO tweeting about Iran or Ukraine — but you might want something else from them instead.

15:57 — Wonder, Curiosity, and Barry Lopez
Four questions a nature writer asks of a place might be the best onboarding tool you’ve never used.

19:44 — The Practical Pivot
One thing to actually try this afternoon. No retreat required.

21:39 — Post-Show Roundtable
What happens when you ask a candidate what they’re curious about? When you answer a nasty email with humility instead of a rebuttal? The hosts try the episode’s ideas on themselves.

Elaine Howard Ecklund & Denise Daniels join the Mode/Switch Pod to help managers engage the sacred as a source of strength on the job. (You'll also learn to avoid missteps!)

Since the everything in the world feels so peaceful right now, let’s bring up an easy topic: religion at work.

I know, I know. But if you’re feeling of missteps about what your people hold sacred, this podcast is for you!

This week’s Mode/Switch Pod engages sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and entrepreneurship professor Denise Daniels to share their research (15,000 surveys, 300 qualitative interviews!) on how huge a driver faith is in the workplace.

Our intergenerational team—Josh (Millennial), Madeline (Gen Z), and I (slacker Gen X)—probe their findings, examining the startling power of religious faith to provide meaning beyond oneself.

Isn’t it complicated to talk about faith at work? Um, yes.

But Ecklund & Daniels’s new book Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work and this week’s podcast helps you practice a respectful pluralism as you encounter religious difference in the workplace.

Our intergenerational team (Gen Z, Millennial, and Gen X) probe these researchers’ arguments, engaging questions like…

• Is religion at work a Trojan horse for proselytizing?

• What is legitimate religious expression at work? What’s discriminatory?

• Why are men more willing to talk about faith at work, even though women are more likely to find religious meaning in their work?

• How can you create psychological safety for religious practitioners at work?

  If you’re a mid-level leader who studiously avoids mentioning the sacred at work, you might be trying to be non-discriminatory. Thank you for that! But I encourage you to listen to this brisk, funny, and definitely data-driven conversation to learn how it’s not actually religiously neutral to ignore people’s diverse faith commitments on the job.

No topic has evoked more F bombs in my research than workplace spirituality. In the late 2010s, I interviewed dozens of organizational leaders about mindfulness in their working communities. I was looking for practical spirituality. I kept finding obscenity.

To be fair, these leaders were mostly dismissing woo-woo stuff. When it came down to it, they were sympathetic with genuine spirituality at work. But still, one business owner, Corey Kohn, heard a recommendation for Hawaiian spiritual retreats and shot back: “Like, f*ck you. I don't want to rage, but don't tell me that that's what I need to do to have a more balanced life.”

Still, all the strong feelings made me curious. Why do people have such strong reactions to something so apparently benevolent as meditation and prayer?

For one thing, cheap notions of mindfulness erode trust in the workplace. If you encourage your team to put their feet on the floor, you might sound like a know-it-all. As in, You’re clearly not in a good head space. Let me help you get where I am. Imposing mindfulness on your team can transform a healthy thing into a device for unhealthy workism.

Mindfulness talk, in other words, isn’t just obnoxious. It can also be an oppressive managerial tool.1

If you’re feeling skeptical about mindfulness at work you have a point. It can indeed evoke trauma or induce uncomfortable feelings. It can be moralistic and invasive and culty. Worse, it can serve as a cover for structural problems in the workplace. Feeling stressed? What you need is more deep breathing! (Actually, they could use more honesty from leadership.)

But mindfulness at work still represents a vital mode/switch for you and your team.

Our guest this week on the Mode/Switch Pod, Irene Kraegel, sees your skepticism and raises you a better definition.

If “becoming more mindful” sounds like, ya know, chilling, this week’s pod helps redefine the practice more resourcefully. Actually, I shouldn’t say practice, singular, because Irene differentiates between formal and informal practices, plural. Some of what she has to say is useful as a formal, collective practice in meetings, in one-on-ones, in conference calls. But some of what she recommends is informally helpful for you in moments of stressed-out lonesomeness.

But the goal of the Mode/Switch is not just to help you feel more serene, more luminous. The goal, instead is to help you be present to what’s actually happening in your organization. If you can be more mindful, you can help your team be more fully human at work. (And maybe help your senior leaders act more human, too.)

Whether you lead from the middle—as project coordinator, middle manager, program director, department chair—or whether you are led from the middle, I encourage you to listen to this roundtable conversation. It offers you two kinds of tools:

1. Intergenerational perspectives: Ken the Boomer, Josh the Millennial, Madeline the Z, and I the Xer discuss how mindfulness gets carried differently, depending on your generational standpoint.

2. Internal communication: Irene’s careful definitions of and recommendations for mindfulness will shape the phrasing you use with your team, the metaphors you select, the stories you tell, the framing you offer.

You’ve experienced, I hope, moments of awareness and flow on your team. You’ve seen your people laugh in tense moments. You’ve heard coworkers de-escalate a tricky 1:1. You’ve witnessed leadership be humbly transparent. You’ve run a meeting or two when things seem paced just right for thoughtful collaboration.

Wouldn’t it be great if these gifts weren’t just random moments of goodness but characteristic parts of your organizational ethos?

To achieve that sort of steady mindfulness, you’ll need a no-nonsense and down-to-earth guide for being there with your people in a world of work.

Irene and the team can help you get there!